The U2 Experience

IQ magazine analyses the Innocence and Experience tour in its November issue.

U2: Exclusive interview as Brendan O'Connor enters the belly of the beast

When the unthinkable happened at U2’s recent Berlin concert and Bono lost his voice, it could have been the end. Bono tells Brendan O’Connor about that emasculating moment, about the crisis of faith sparked by a near-death experience, the reliving of his mother’s death on stage every night, and the gift of an olive tree from the Pope

The Showman

In this moment in Madrid, Bono is like a small child. A small, vulnerable child. He seems fragile. You would wrap him up in cotton wool. His voice, which he just used to sing to tens of thousands of people, is tiny. "Performing reduces as it enlarges," he says later.

It feels wrong to talk to him right now in this intimate moment as he walks off the stage, but vulnerable little boys need approval, and show people, even if they're Bono, need it, so I tell him that I think it was the best U2 show I've ever seen. Funnily enough, in this moment, right now, there is no one else there to tell him that. Even the rest of the band are gone already, whisked off to the airport as soon as the last note is played, to get home to Dublin tonight


Then someone wraps a towel around Bono, which seems appropriate, and someone hands him a bottle of water. He seems to struggle for a moment with how to grasp this object, maybe with what it is. He is, for now, hollowed out, empty. Because he left it all out there on the stage, for all those people. Because that is the U2 promise, what he calls the punk-rock promise. That you don't just do the gig. You have to actually go there yourself every night, to find what Bono bluntly calls The Thing.

For Bono, on this tour, that means reliving again and again the death of his mother when was he was a boy. And how he managed to reclaim her, and her memory, in a house where her name was barely mentioned for a long time after she died. It also means reliving an existential crisis, a crisis of faith that arose from coming as close to death as a person can come. And while some of the show is acting, it is method acting. He has to go there to some extent.

Even though you know on some level he does this every night, even though you saw him do it two years ago, the point in the show where he shows those videos - the only precious record he has of his mother - and when he segues from singing The Ocean into Iris, his song for her, it feels almost obscene to be portraying things this raw in a rock 'n' roll gig.

It is, perhaps, this need to do it for real every night that makes Bono anxious and antsy sometimes on a show day. Sometimes he wakes up feeling nauseous, thinking, "I don't know if I can do this." Not play the show, or sing the show, but find The Thing, the thing that "makes it New Year's Eve wherever you are in the world, on Tuesday night". So this whole juggernaut, this show, this band, is still a fragile thing.

Sometimes you can't make it on your own

A few weeks before, in Berlin, there was a stark reminder of just how fragile. When Bono's voice suddenly went, early in the gig, with no warning, The Edge kept playing. But in his head, as he stood there playing guitar, The Edge was running through options. Should he step up and sing? Then he wonders if they should get someone to go and find the taped guide vocals they sometimes use for rehearsal. And maybe Bono could mime. He's running through these options really quickly in his head as he keeps playing, but he realises they can't do that. It wouldn't be a U2 gig. The gig is halted while they figure out what to do.

When the band convenes beneath the stage, Bono feels not so much embarrassed as emasculated, like he's had his hair chopped off a la Samson: "The strong man … with no strength". The thing Bono finds most odd is that there was nothing wrong with his voice. He's done gigs with a sore voice before. They didn't finish an encore once about 30 years ago, but there has never been a show cancelled. But this time, he says, "It moved so quickly from singing well to not being able to sing at all - that was the shock."

Under the stage, the others are being very nice about it. The audience was nice about it, too. They sang the song - Red Flag Day - for Bono. They would have sung the rest of the gig for him, too. Because there is a special bond here. And, as The Edge says about U2 songs, "Once they're out, we feel in some ways they're no longer our songs; they belong to everyone who listens to a U2 album, so that spirit really roils us up and supports us."

Under the stage, they ring Bono's voice doctor, Stephen Zeitels. The Edge talks to him. Zeitels thinks, largely because Bono's voice went so quickly, that there's a 70pc chance it's a vocal haemorrhage. If that's the case, it's not good. If it's a bad vocal haemorrhage, you're talking years, if ever, to get back singing.

Bono can tell that people around him are contemplating that it could all be over. Not just the gig, but the whole thing. But Bono knows it isn't over. He knows he hasn't broken it. He could feel his voice was working. He knew he would have felt something if it had popped. But Zeitels was adamant the gig could not go ahead. Bono's throat needed to be checked.

Even now, a few weeks on, at the Madrid leg, no one you talk to seems to know exactly what the problem was. Bono says they're not sure, but it might have been a vocal spasm brought on by an allergic reaction to something. It might have been smoke; it might have been a blockage in the ventilation system.

Bono was listening to old tapes recently, of a young U2 performing in the Marquee in London, in 1981. The band sounded incredible, he says, "but what's not incredible is me". The other three have always been "good to great", he thinks. And while he can see that he was probably a good frontman back then, a good town crier, spirit, lightning rod, he doesn't think he was a great singer. Right now, though, he thinks he has finally caught up with them. Everyone is now on top form, and this is why he thinks this is the best time ever to see U2. He had this realisation in the middle of a concert in New York recently. The band were on the smaller E stage, where they play together at close proximity for a good chunk of the gig. They were playing Acrobat, Bono says. The Edge was performing alchemy on the guitar, Larry was playing like Ginger Baker, and Adam was on fire. And Bono had this realisation. That it's not about the 80s or the 90s; this moment is the best time ever to see this band. They are on fire, he thinks, and now he's matching their fire.

"I'm singing like a bird now," he will tell me the next day, when he is Bono again.

As we hop into a people carrier after the gig, he is slowly coming back to himself. He apologises again to his wife, Ali, for parading his devotion to her and their relationship on the stage. He had apologised to her already from the stage. As the air gradually comes back into him, he chats to his daughter, Jordan, and her boyfriend, who is from Madrid. And then he is back to being Bono, babbling a bit, talking passionately about everything from the Madrilenos' capacity for nightlife, to the need for artists to tell stories about the European dream, in the way Hollywood propagandised for the American Dream.

Spanish eyes

In 1987, U2 played in the Estadio Santiago Bernabeu, the home of Real Madrid. It was wild. 90,000 tickets; Bono reckons about 120,000 people. They were crawling over the top of the stadium to get in. The pitch was destroyed. There were no screens back in those days of the original Joshua Tree tour. You were reliant on the music, mainly on Adam Clayton's bass, to fill the stadium and bring the whole situation together. Bono is proud that, 30 years on, this band are still on top form. How many guys, he asks, tongue in cheek, who played for Manchester United 30 years ago, still play now?

Actor Javier Bardem was at that gig 30 years ago. And he is at both Madrid gigs this time. On the second night, he is in a frenzy. He could be a metalhead from the midlands at an AC/DC gig in the 1980s. He roars along to every word from every song. There's air guitar, punching the air, pogoing, sweat pouring everywhere. He even knows every word of Spanish Eyes, a relatively obscure Joshua Tree B-side that U2 play tonight. They play it mainly because when The Edge was talking to fans earlier in the day, they had begged him to play it. And The Edge seems to like a challenge.

This is how Spanish Eyes happens: it's five minutes before the band go on stage, and they have come together in a room. Somebody is searching for a version of Spanish Eyes the band played on tour recently. They don't play it much. They haven't played it in a while. But The Edge is adamant. They dig out a version from San Diego, but that's not the one they want. Someone remembers it is Mexico City they want. So they dig out the Mexico City version from last year. Adam is sitting on a couch, quietly playing along on an acoustic bass. Bono sings snatches of it, pointing to The Edge for his bits of vocal. Bono wants the lyrics written down, just in case.

Larry Mullen saunters into the room. Larry gets a bit of physiotherapy before a gig. There's a certain amount of wear and tear that comes with Larry Mullen's full-on style of drumming. Someone gives Larry a cup of coffee. With just minutes to the show, he makes small talk with me about going to see Real Madrid a few nights before (Everybody in U2 and in the U2 organisation is impeccably polite, whatever the situation). Then someone says to Bono and The Edge that they should perhaps appraise Larry of the last-minute addition to the set list. Larry doesn't seem bothered by it. Would he like to hear it? Just the start, for a moment, so he knows when to come in. They play him the start of it. All good to go.

It was worth the last-minute effort. The crowd, and especially Javier, are ecstatic when it kicks in at the end of the show. And it doesn't sound like they're just busking it.

Bono will say of tonight's show that it felt effortless. The songs, he says, were singing him, rather than the other way around. And what was most extraordinary, and what the band are clearly delighted about, is that they aren't really playing a lot of their biggest hits. There is nothing tonight from The Joshua Tree, but it still works. The show is heavy on material from the two most recent albums (though Songs of Innocence numbers will tend to be dropped in favour of Achtung Baby numbers as the tour moves through Europe) and the crowd greet the new stuff like old friends. And relevance, you can tell, is very important to U2 right now.

It felt a bit wrong to be standing there with them just before they went on stage, in what is presumably a very intimate moment. But then, Bono used to be able to meet hundreds of people before he went on stage. He says if they were in, say, Washington, he could meet 150 people; congressmen and women, whoever. He wouldn't say it was easy, but he could do it. "I cannot do that now," he says, "I don't know if it's where I'm at in my own life, or whether it's the particular nature of this show."

The next morning, he will talk about where he's at in his own life.

The little things that give you away

He bounces out of his bedroom, marvelling that he woke up this morning and there was a beautiful woman in the bed next to him. And it was so much better, he says, than waking up alone. Bono has always appreciated his wife. We know that, because he has always talked about it.

But Bono had to change everything recently. He had to change how he approaches his whole life. He had to learn to leave behind all the things that made him suwhole process has been to appreciate everything more, but especially his family.

Bono has undergone, not so much a midlife crisis, more a crisis of faith. Coming as close to dying as you can come, which he felt should have strengthened his faith, saw him losing his faith.

This is the story then, or as close as we will get to it for now, of what happened Bono these last few years, and how he learnt to live again, to live anew, like the man who walked away from the air crash.

There's a monk in the desert in New Mexico. Breaking Bad country. A 'free radical' Bono calls him. And the reason why Bono went to the desert to see this monk is detailed in one of the core songs on Songs of Experience.

The songs on this album were largely written as letters to various people in Bono's life. When he was writing The Little Things That Give You Away, Bono initially thought it was a letter to someone. But then he realised it was actually about him. This can happen, he says. Sometimes you think you're writing about one thing, but it's actually about something else.

Sometimes I wake at four in the morning

When all the darkness is swarming

And it covers me in fear…

Sometimes I'm full of anger and grieving

So far away from believing

That any song will reappear

Hear those lyrics with this new information and it almost sounds like he was begging for a sign from God.

For Bono to be losing his faith was no small thing. It was shocking to him. His faith is what gives him his freedom, which he calls "the most intoxicating thing in the whole world".

"You can sort of do anything when you have the faith," he says, "Nothing can take you out… It's like rope-a-dope. It's just, 'give it to me'." He acts out a boxer taking the hits.

I was surprised that, on this tour, during the song, Even Better Than The Real Thing, Bono has been referencing the Holy Spirit. "What takes us higher?" he asks, "The Holy Spirit? I hope so."

In the past, he has sometimes seemed reluctant to talk too much about his faith. He says he is more comfortable talking about it now. But, equally, he doesn't like to present himself as some exemplar of faith, because he is still, very much, a worldly person. He thinks that when people see him out running amok with his mates, they might look askance at this so-called man of faith. Though he says he is still the same man of faith in those situations.

He seems pleased that it has "turned out" that all six members of his family - he, his wife, his two girls, and his two boys - have faith. He says it was never pushed on the kids. Sure, they went to service now and then, and they might read scripture together at home, or out walking on the beach. They have big beds in both their houses, and sometimes they might all be on the bed together, and they might pray. And you know what they pray for? A very simple thing. They pray to be useful. And they mean it. "And it's not all wafty either," he says, "Because we are trying to follow the example of Christ, but," he laughs, "some of us have a poorer record than others."

So it is a muscular, practical faith; an action faith.

Bono is less a churchman than a man of faith. He thinks religion, with its doctrine and dogma, can take away that precious freedom that faith offers.

But he was impressed by the Pope when he met him earlier in the week. He believes the Pope's anger. Ask Bono what his faith is, and he says that's too big a question. But he tries to demonstrate it with a story about the Pope and an olive tree.

So, the Pope gave Bono an olive tree. The olive tree is regarded as a symbol of the three Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. And the Pope said, "I'd like you to plant that. Where are you going next? Maybe the next stop." And Bono said, "I'm going to Spain." And the Pope said, "That would be great."

So Bono decided that he would plant the olive tree in the Alhambra in Granada, where the playwright and poet Federico Garcia Lorca roamed since he was a child. Lorca, we think, was killed by a firing squad in Granada on the orders of Franco's people, and buried, there and then, in a mass grave, in a ravine - or "a ditch" as Bono more bluntly puts it. Lorca has no grave, as such. So Bono has got permission to plant this olive tree quietly in the Alhambra as a memorial to Lorca. Clearly, Bono feels it squares some circle that this olive tree from The Pope should mark the grave of Lorca, who was killed by the allies of the Catholic Church. And that he is planting it in a centre of Islam, in a place that Lorca, through one of his characters, called "a jasmine of grief".

But that's not the point. He brings me from the balcony and into the room to show me. So there is the olive tree from the Pope. And then Bono turns me around, and there, in his posh hotel suite, encased in glass, there is another, much bigger, olive tree growing. And for him, that rhymes in some way. And that is how he answers my question about what is his faith.

He describes this poetic journey to demonstrate that "you can't approach the subject of God without metaphor". When you understand that, he says, "the scriptures open up, so you start to see. You have the fabulism and the creation myth - beautiful, the poetry of it. Or some of the Old Testament books, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs. You see the power of John, John's Gospel. You see Paul, a proper fucking prick; he held Stephen's coat when he was being stoned… And this is the guy, [who] falls off his horse, etc… [has his] Damascene experience, writes this ode to love… and some of the most beautiful writing of exhortation we have, some of it while he's in prison." Even in prison, total freedom. And that, for Bono, is what faith gives you.

So it was scary when he thought he was losing it. Bono had seen his own dad, who was so encouraging of Bono's faith, lose his, right when he needed it, on his deathbed. And he felt it happening to him now, after his own near-deathbed experience.

God, part two

Bono says he's not being precious or anything in not detailing what happened him when he nearly died, he just doesn't want to get into the soap opera of it. "Lots of people have had these, so I think it's OK to continue without explanation. Just fill in your own crisis…your own health emergency."

In terms of his faith going, he felt the air going out of him, literally and metaphorically. And he realised, "even that requires watering, tending to. You can spiritually run yourself out."

And he wrote that song, which turned out to be a letter to himself, and he realised, he says, that, "You are not well with yourself, and you need to really… reboot. You need to refresh, you need to re-imagine your life going forward."

So Bono and the band went to see this Franciscan friar, this free radical in the desert, at his Centre for Action and Contemplation, which describes itself as "a centre for experiential education, rooted in the Gospels, encouraging the transformation of human consciousness through contemplation, and equipping people to be instruments of peaceful change in the world".

Richard Rohr is essentially a Christian mystic, who supports a new reformation, from inside, and who encourages and helps believers to get in touch with their inner spiritual intuitions. He is also a Jungian, and takes in a bit from Buddhism and Hinduism and Gandhi, too.

Rohr's book, Falling Upwards, is about finding, in the second half of life, a new journey, or a new way of doing the journey. Rohr says that the ego is hugely resistant to this change. Often he says, a job, a fortune, a reputation has to be lost, a death has to be suffered, a house has to be flooded, or a disease has to be endured, to force us out of the laziness that makes us resist changing our path. So Bono, then, after his near-extinction event, was ripe for Rohr's message.

To explain what Rohr did for him, Bono references this quote from Jung that Rohr uses: "One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life's morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true, will, at evening, become a lie."

Bono interprets it this way: "Not only are the things that brought you everything you have, that brought you to where you are, not useful in the second half of your life, they positively work against you."

Bono says that Richard Rohr says the hardest people he has to deal with are successful people, because, Bono explains, "it's their dysfunction that has made them successful. I mean, think about it. What's another word for somebody who is up in their bedroom practising guitar all day? Got OCD. You repeat actions and you become very good at it."

So what was the hitherto successful dysfunction that Bono had to leave behind?

The thing is, he is clearly someone who is constantly reassessing himself, both as a person and as an artist. When everything you do at work is so expansive and public, and when you do it with such an open heart and with such an almost naive belief in, and commitment to, the current moment, it must, indeed, be hard not to look back and cringe sometimes. And he does. He talks about losing the run of himself and his ego at various points. He had reason recently to watch himself giving Frank Sinatra a Grammy legend award in 1994. His summing up of it is: "I walk on, sheets of paper, smoking a cigar at the Grammys…and it's just 'an obnoxious fuck'."

He recalls another broadcast, "something about Phil Collins" and all he can say about himself on that occasion is "Shut up! Shut up!"

It's fun, he says, playing with the cliches of being a rock star, but it might have got a little out of hand at times. So there you have it. Even Bono wishes Bono would shut up sometimes.

But the major dysfunction he had to give up, to embrace the second half of life, was outgrowing his 'shoulder to the door' approach to life. Sometimes you should just open the door, he says, because it isn't actually locked. Another way he puts it is that, "It really helped for somebody like myself, who is so aggressive - sorry, so aggressively involved with the world - [to realise] that I have to be more peaceful." As simple and as complicated as that.

And some of it is about the simple things. For example, Bono has always been up early, meditating and reading and writing. He likes to be working by 6am. Traditionally, he has managed on five hours' sleep. He's getting better now. He tries to get more. Seven hours is amazing for him. Five hours' sleep is that "other version of myself that I have to outgrow".

The blackout

"What I need, or I needed," he says, "was to understand that I, I mean we, are not going on forever, and that we are, you know, just inhabiting our bodies and our moments in time, and try to be useful… and, you know, don't think force can always move an immoveable object. I think probably at the heart of my stupidity is… I'm attracted to Everests, and I'm attracted to the impossible. That's my thing, and it's kind of at a certain point… just be careful… and what I'm learning now with imposed humility is, say, in terms of my activism and other things: How many big punches do you have left to throw in your life? Because you don't want to be wasting it in the wrong fights."

So is he coming to a point now where he has realised, for real, 'my time is limited here, actually'?

"Yeah."

Is that scary when you realise that? Upsetting?

"Not any more, but I'm the last… I'm the idiot. This happens to me and I'm like, I'm like in the Monty Python film, I'm the body-less knight … I'm a head on the ground," he says, referring to the Black Knight, a character who appears in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The Black Knight refuses to give up, even when his four limbs are cut off and his attackers move on: "Running away, eh? You yellow bastards! Come back here and take what's coming to ya! I'll bite your legs off!"

The Edge says Bono views his body as an inconvenience. Bono's wife tells him that if he had a knife in his back, he'd be walking around saying, "Something's itchy".

So you'll keep on raging?

"Did you say raging? Correct, that's the right word, getting to a place where my rage is becoming more controlled, and where I am trying to be more strategic in my struggle and the fight. And the street-fighting that I grew up with, literally and metaphorically, has to be replaced with boxing and, eventually, jiu-jitsu. You have to stop using your own strength, and I think I'm getting more to that place, but I'm a slow learner, really."

Is this a midlife crisis? He's not sure about that. "It was nearly an end-life crisis," he says. But he now knows for real that he is going to die. He says it's like the title of the Damien Hirst work, 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'. Even though we are sure we will die, it's an abstraction. "We know, but we don't really."

So does he really know now?

"Yeah, and I've had a few of them, moments where I've gone. 'Oh, oh. Wow. OK'."

So is he like the guy who walked away from the aeroplane crash now?

"Yes, I am that guy."

So is he grateful for everything now?

Yes, every single day. I'm really grateful for my family. You know, Ali had to go through a lot. You know, it's funny… be careful of what you, not wish for, but meditate on. You know, as an artist, I'm interested in death. The Dalai Lama says we begin our meditations on life with death. The advantage I had as an artist is I'm 14 years old, just coming into proper consciousness, being a male, all of that, and... bang!", he says, referencing his mother Iris's death. "That can be a terrible thing, but it turns out that my mother gave me this great gift, and so now it might have knocked me a bit, but it shoots you forward as an artist, because now you're dealing with that subject, and you may not have any intelligent insights into it, but you're certainly dealing with it. And mortality is the only game in town, because - and this is what I love about U2 - it's defiance, because the essence of romance is defiance."

The sweetest thing

Part of this new version of Bono is appreciating his family more. Did they miss out? As kids? "I tell you," he says, "It's the loaves and fishes. We seem to have managed to have been an extremely close family without having a traditional route to that." He says he feels a little bit more for the girls, the two eldest. But then the girls had the 1990s, and that was great fun, and they enjoyed all of that. And he doesn't think they missed out too much. And he doesn't give his wife all the credit for that. Just most of it. He takes some credit, too. And he gives huge credit also to the Dalkey School Project NS, "a brilliant school", and St Andrews College, "amazing; really good to these kids", and to people in Dublin, for the fact that his kids grew up in a reasonably normal way. He thinks his children have "a sense of duty. They know they've been privileged, and they know they have to give back and work at that".

Bono's son, Eli, is in a band now. Inhaler. Famous dad aside, Eli - who Bono says gives no thought to the fact that his father is Bono - is a good frontman, at just 18. If you watch videos of Inhaler playing on YouTube, sometimes you will see something familiar in the confident, but still slightly apprehensive and suspicious way that Eli approaches the mic. It must be odd for Bono watching Eli set out on this path. It must be hard not to want to stick his oar in. But he tries not to. Eli did ask him did he think they should get a manager, and Bono told him they probably should. You can see that right now he is resisting being a proud dad.

Funny thing. The night Bono lost his voice in Berlin, Inhaler played at Electric Picnic, probably their most high-profile gig to date. Eli's mother was down at the Picnic to see him play. Later on, Ali went on to see B*witched play, so she couldn't hear her phone ringing as Gavin Friday frantically tried to contact her from Berlin to tell her what had happened to Bono.

Eli has been accepted into art college in London, but wants to defer and give this band a year to see what happens. This is exactly what Bono did, and Bob, his dad, supported him back then: rent-free for a year while they gave the band a go. He even supported them to the tune of giving the band £1,000 when they were ripped off by a publisher in London.

Bono looks up to the five people in his family, and "with Johnny [his youngest] at six foot, I've no choice". But his wife tells him she doesn't want him to look up to her or down on her, just look across at her, "I'm here".

The appreciation extends to the fans. Someone who works with the band says to me at one point, just casually, "as Bono always says, we must appreciate them because they give us this life".

At the hotel that U2 are staying in, as with all the hotels they stay in, fans have gathered. One thing you understand when you dip into into the world of U2 on tour is that nothing is left to chance. Everything is organised and managed. Even the fans outside the hotel. Bono's right-hand man, Brian, and his colleagues, get the hotel's cooperation to allow the fans to wait in a particular area out the front. They are minded and given water. They are told if the band will not be able to come out to meet them. But usually the band do, and people are told when to expect them and who is coming. Adam comes out to them first to a big cheer, and he walks amiably among them, taking time for everyone to get their picture or autograph. The Edge is next, and he seems to get even more involved with everyone, clearly listening to their entreaties, for example, to play Spanish Eyes.

And then there's Bono. It's extraordinary to watch him. It's not just that you see him deep in conversation with people, it's that he listens to them. He stands there, actually listening thoughtfully, taking it all in. He draws an elaborate doodle for one woman, like some street artist down the road in the Plaza Mayor.

The wanderer

After the informal meet-and-greet, I hop in a car with The Edge to go to the venue. The Edge says he enjoys meeting the fans. You even get to know some of them, he says. Some of them there have been to every gig on the tour - America, and now Europe. You can sense The Edge is feeling good about being in U2 right now.

He remembers back to the time of the 360 Tour, when he says there was a danger that U2, while continuing to be a very successful live band, weren't enough of a part of "the cultural conversation", that their new material was not being played enough on the radio. So with the last two albums, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, there was what he says was, "a concerted effort to be, for want of a better term, back in competition… rather than making work that might be fun for us" but that might not connect to the wider audience. Connecting to the wider audience has always been U2's ambition.

"You know, the world is full of bad poetry written by people who are just expressing themselves," he says with a smirk. "We don't want to be part of that."

Part of him feeling good about it is that he still likes the road after all these years. There's a bit of the gypsy in him, he says, and he still gets that buzz of excitement heading to the airport, as does his wife, Morleigh. Having Morleigh along - she is their resident director for some of the tour, acting as a kind of quality-control manager, the band's "eyes and ears in the crowd" - is fun, too.

Once he dons a baseball hat instead of his usual beanie, he can even maybe get to see some of the city they are in. He admits that when he went to see the Russian Dada 1914-1924 exhibition at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, they did get chased at a certain point by U2 fans, but, he says, it's manageable.

Has Bono's loss of voice, and other events over the last few years, meant he has contemplated at times the possibility of this band not existing any more? He has, and he is confident he would be fine. He has enough interests outside of U2 to keep him going. But it's a hell of a lot more fun, and a lot more challenging, being in U2, he says. He concedes though that he's looking forward to some breathing space when this tour ends, to enjoy music "without feeling like there's a time clock or some intention". While he's been living back and forth between Ireland and the US over the last few years, this year, it'll be a lot of Ireland. "A great leveller. It's sanity. It's kind of that everything makes sense there for me, and I think it's holding on to that connection with not just the country, but with our community of friends and family that date back to when we were going to Clash gigs."

But all the time, he is working away on music. He has a little studio that he brings on the road, and he finds that playing in front of audiences every night is a great proving ground for songs, and you keep some sense of that about you while writing new stuff on the road. Right now, his passion is proving again the possibilities of guitar music. You look at the charts and you listen to the radio, he says, and it's practically all electronic music. So this is the Edge's current challenge. To keep guitar music alive.

Lights of home

After Dublin this week, U2 return to Berlin to play for the people who were there the night Bono lost his voice. Bono says proudly that even though thousands of those people came from overseas for that gig, only 220 people looked for a refund. They are all coming back again. Both Bono and The Edge are looking forward to Dublin, obviously. The Edge feels there's a lot of pressure playing Dublin, not least because there are so many friends and so many guests there. But the energy from the crowd, he says, is second to none.

Bono is a bit more philosophical, and maybe even slightly apprehensive about the reception the band get in Dublin. He says it's humbling to have been given the position they have been given in Irish life, and he's sure it must be annoying for Irish people at times, being expected to have a position on U2, the way you have to have a position on the Irish soccer team. But, he says, "Forgetting all that bollocks, there's a mighty fine rock 'n' roll band coming home for Christmas. I know it's a little early, but for us, Christmas starts on November 5."

U2 play the Three Arena tomorrow night, Monday, November 5, Tuesday 6, Friday 9, and Saturday 10. All concerts are sold out.U2's 'Songs of Experience' is out now.

Portrait by Anton Corbijn

Sunday Indo Life Magazine

www.independent.ie

Bono has every right to bash Brexit onstage – rock is meant to provoke debate

by Neil McCormick

Bono performing with U2 at the O2 Arena, London

It seems fair to assume Bono is a Remainer.
“For us, this is more than a gold star falling off a blue flag,” the Irish rock superstar told London’s O2 Arena this week. “It’s a loss of shared dreams.”
Bono and his band mates in U2 were standing in front of a humongous European flag, in which one of the 12 stars had been filled with a Union Jack, enclosed in a red heart.
 “We’ve been touring across Europe,” he said, “and all we hear is that people love the UK and don’t want you to leave.” To drive the point home, U2 played One, written and recorded in a Berlin studio in 1990, with 20,000 British fans taking up its freshly politicised refrain:
“We are one, but we are not the same / We get to carry each other.”
 This was a fiercer, rockier U2 than I have seen in decades. It was also the band at their most nakedly political. A lot of people are put off by Bono’s relentless campaigning for various causes – mainly the charities he has supported and founded.
 It is the source of the most pervasive criticism of U2, a band who seem to be loathed as much as they are loved. Some people think politics has no place in pop music at all – presumably the same people who thought John Lennon should have stuck to singing love songs, and Bob Marley would have been better served rhapsodising ganja.
 For those people, U2’s latest tour will be their most provocative yet. Brexit is not a global humanitarian issue on which all people of sensitive natures can broadly agree, like the Make Poverty History campaign. It is much more narrowly focussed and locally divisive than that. But if you take political positions, you court division. You have to come off the fence where most entertainers delicately balance.

U2 performing their Innocence + Experience show in London

Having watched this group all my life, from their very first show in a Dublin school in 1976, I have seen how flexible they can be in adapting each show to its audience.
But while other bands might tone things down to avoid offending local sensitivities, U2 do the opposite.
 The Experience + Innocence tour that U2 brought to the UK was almost entirely different from the production that launched in America six months ago.
 On its debut in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the visual imagery touched on Mexican immigration, gun control and the rise of the US alt-right. In London, there was footage of ruined European cities at the end of World War II, the implication being that the European Union was born from these ashes.
When the band reach their home town of Dublin for four concerts next week, the staging and message will undoubtedly change again.
 In Tulsa this May, when U2 showed footage of the Charlottesville Unite The Right rally from 2017 (in which a counter-protestor was killed) a section of the audience cheered the sight of American neo-Nazis waving swastikas. It was proof that U2 aren’t always playing to the converted.

It reminded me of a gig in Chile in 1998, when U2 played Mothers of the Disappeared – a song implicitly critical of former dictator General Augusto Pinochet – and a section of the crowd started booing the band. “It’s proof to me that a rock ‘n’ roll audience are not lemmings,” Bono later said to me.

“They’re not going to just follow you off the cliff, they’re not going to vote how you tell them to vote. If they don’t agree with you, they will let you know. That doesn’t mean they’re not fans. I was flattered that we weren’t just playing to people who agreed with us.”

Personally, I think it is one of the things rock and roll is built for: to challenge you, to make you feel, to make you think, to make you want to act.



www.telegraph.co.uk

U2 review – eye-popping show finds rock icons at their most human

Manchester Arena

Fronted by a humbler, more reflective Bono than usual, U2 lead the crowd in a dazzling celebration of oneness.

No matter their stature, most rock gods eventually realise that the concert-going public no longer want new music, just classics and the greatest hits. U2 seemed to finally bow to this inevitability last year, when they toured The Joshua Tree, the 1987 album that made them the biggest band in the world. However, as bassist Adam Clayton explained recently, playing the whole album in fact freed them from its shadow: “If you wanted those songs, it’s done.” Hence the present Experience + Innocence tour, on which the Dublin four-piece shun their best-loved album in favour of an adventurous 24-song setlist, including seven songs from last year’s Songs of Experience, and take a self-deprecating, sideways look at their long career.

It is also the most visually spectacular outing yet for a band who have previously toured with a mirrorball lemon and a giant claw. An enormous “barricage”, the length of the arena, bombards the crowd with imagery before the band are suddenly revealed to be playing inside it, behind the screens. In the show’s most eye-popping moments, U2 rock on beneath arena-sized pixelated images of themselves.

It only relents as a spectacle when they play early songs Gloria and I Will Follow on a conventional stage, dressed in post-punk black, with minimal lighting, and Bono remembers first playing in Manchester as “four Irish boys, lost in the innocence, and all that hair”. The 1980s mullets are long gone, but Bono talks reflectively of wanting “to rediscover that innocence we had”.

And for all the bells and whistles that turn Even Better Than the Real Thing, Acrobat (played live for the first time on this tour) or the sublime new Get Out of Your Own Way into arena-thrilling whoppers, the show is surprisingly personal and intimate. A series of tiny stages means they’re almost as close to their audience as when, billed as “the U2s”, they played to nine people at the Hope & Anchor in London in 1979. During Vertigo, played in the round, the Edge’s guitar swings so near to the front rows it looks as if he might take someone’s head off. Even played in the cage, a stripped-down Stay (Faraway So Close!) is truly lovely.

On screen, facial distortion technology turns Bono into his devilish Zooropa alter ego Mr MacPhisto, but while the old devil still clearly relishes playing rock stars, this is a humbler U2 frontman than we’ve seen before now. Now 58, he reflects candidly on how stardom “expands and diminishes the young man’s mind”, and, mindful of a recent mysterious “brush with death”, he praises: “the real heroes – firemen and nurses.”

His earnest, flag-waving politicking has long driven refuseniks – and even bandmates – crazy. But here, U2’s campaigning is all the more effective for its comparative subtlety. With accompanying images of refugees and far-right violence, Pride sounds enormous, a plea for humanity “in the name of love”. Bono frets about Brexit’s impact on post-Troubles Ireland and “this Disunited Kingdom”, and roars into New Year’s Day under a European Union flag. But other key moments are understated. Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way accompanies images of embracing LGBTQ couples. Hymnal closer 13 (There Is a Light) is described as “a prayer” for the victims of the 2017 terrorist bombing in this arena, and is poignantly illustrated by a solitary lightbulb.

It is not necessarily their best show – some people will be missing those biggest hits – but it is certainly their most human. Midway through, Bono reveals that the band almost broke up while making Achtung Baby, before writing the magnificent One brought them back together. Twenty-eight years later, the song unites both band and audience in a defiant celebration of togetherness.

www.theguardian.com

Why U2, Four Irishmen, Might Be America's Greatest Band Ever

15 May - Los Angeles, CA, USA / The Forum

The choice for best British band ever is pretty easy. Most will go with the Beatles. A few will argue for Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones, but the Beatles are the consensus choice. However, best American band is a much harder debate. There are arguments for Aerosmith, Beach Boys, Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground (probably the most influential), the Ramones or some might make a case for Nirvana or Pearl Jam.

Here’s a thought, what if America’s greatest band of all time isn’t actually from America? What if it is four Irish guys who fell in love with America and have celebrated that ardor through songs for nearly four decades?

Watching U2’s masterful, nearly flawless two and a half hour performance at the first of two sold-out nights at Los Angeles’ Forum Tuesday, May 15 -- where they again paid tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, as has been the case for 34 years, during the spine-tingling, goose bump-inducing “Pride (In The Name Of Love),” where they invoked the spirit of L.A. icon Jim Morrison, throwing in a snippet of “Alabama Song (Last Whisky Bar)” during a dazzling “Until The End Of The World” -- one thing that came through repeatedly throughout the night is their passion and belief in America still burns as deeply as their fervor for music, both awe-inspiring after nearly 40 years.

Certainly you’d be hard pressed to find any band that has championed or believes in the spirit and culture of America more than U2. Their most successful album, The Joshua Tree, is named after a desert in California, they reference jazz giant John Coltrane in “Angel Of Harlem,” a song named after the New York city, they have a song called “Elvis Presley And America,” they were nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for the 2003 song “The Hands That Built America,” from Martin Scorese’s Gangs Of New York.

In the song, Bono sings, “Oh my love/It’s a long way we’ve come/From the freckled hills/To the steel and glass canyons/...These are the hands that built America.”

What is clear from their music and their show at the Forum, where Bono repeatedly reminded fans, “This is America,” they fell in love with the American dream as Irish kids and still, even in these times where many born here are jaded and divided, they feel it is true. At one point, he powerfully spoke of how it is easier to be divided than united while encouraging us to have open eyes and open minds, “even if not open arms,” to those that stand in our way.

Of course without the songs to backup their ideals it means nothing. And this tour finds U2 at their musical best, exploring deeper cuts like “Until The End Of The World,” a stunning rendition of “Acrobat,” and a sublime acoustic “Staring At The Sun,” from what Bono called “The band’s psychedelic phase in the ‘90s.” What was also remarkable was how vital and potent early, early U2 songs “I Will Follow” and “Gloria” were. “Gloria” was a definite high point on a night filled with many of them.

Of the more recent songs, 2014’s “Iris (Hold Me Close),” a song Bono detailed being about his mother, was especially poignant. And Songs Of Experience’s lead single, “You’re The Best Thing About Me” was gorgeous and sweet done acoustically. Other standouts included a spectacular “One,” which began with Bono encouraging “Women Of The World To Take Over,” via a snippet of the Jim O’Rourke song, “Cedarwood Road” and “Love Is All We Have Left.”

Also particularly powerful in the new songs was “American Soul,” in which Bono declares, “It’s not a place to me/This country is, to me, a thought/That offers grace/For every welcome that is sought.” That U2 still feel that is possible and believe that in their musical soul 40 years after they first came here is why U2 could easily be America’s greatest band ever.

In U2’s America, the America we should all still believe in, the one that is open and welcoming, an America built on immigrants, there is not a damn reason in the world why four Irishmen who came here and love this country and believe in it couldn't be the best band we have to offer. It makes perfect sense in their America.

Steve Baltin 

https://www.forbes.com

‘Songs of Experience’ by U2 Review: Rocking Its Classic Sound

The raw, lean authority at much of the new disc’s core harkens back to some of U2’s best albums.

By Jim Fusilli

U2's new album is ‘Songs of Experience’ PHOTO: OLAF HEINE

As its title suggests, U2’s new “Songs of Experience” (Interscope), out now, is kin to the band’s 2014 release, “Songs of Innocence.” Because the group took a different approach to recording the latest album, “Experience” surpasses its predecessor and connects to some of U2’s earlier, superior works.

The titles allude to William Blake’s late 18th-century poetry collections of the same names. “Songs of Innocence” is Blake’s rumination on an idyllic childhood that too soon exists only in memory. Similarly, on U2’s recording, Bono explored his teen years in Dublin, his burgeoning awareness of a larger world, and his appreciation of family and the musical heroes of his youth.

But as compelling as were Bono’s narratives, some of the “Songs of Innocence” music was at a distance from U2’s best instincts. The band has long incorporated the latest techniques in music-making into its sound, but here the muddied environment was unnecessarily overburdened with additional instrumentation contributed by the album’s five producers. Played by just the quartet when U2 took them on the road, as documented in the 2016 film “Innocence + Experience: Live in Paris,” the songs hit with power.

For “Songs of Experience,” U2 again deploys a battery of producers, thus hinting it is following the previous album’s template. When it played the beefy new ballad “The Little Things That Give You Away” earlier this year on tour, the song opened with the Edge on piano and the dull huff-ting of a drum machine. But that arrangement isn’t the one on “Songs of Experience.” Instead, the track builds to a fury with the classic U2 sound under Bono’s voice.

It’s been reported that U2, not satisfied with the new album’s direction, went into a New York studio in March with longtime associate Steve Lillywhite and re-recorded the music live without additional musicians. The raw, lean authority at the core of much of the album supports that claim. Instrumentation retained from earlier sessions and appended to the live tracks distracts as often as it enriches. But “Songs of Experience” confirms that bassist Adam Clayton and drummer Larry Mullen Jr. can still create a bottom so supple and sturdy that the Edge has ample room to chug, chime and roam above them on guitar.

That rhythm section is relentless on “The Blackout,” which blends the punch of rock with the snap of funk. “Summer of Love” and “Red Flag Day” are crisp and clear with the bass and the Edge’s guitar in pleasing relief. After Kendrick Lamar’s riff on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount kicks off “American Soul,” the song profits from the band’s heaviest performance on the disc. If “Songs of Experience” peters out with the cliché-ridden ballad “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way” and soppy “13 (There Is a Light)”—both of which seem to have been made by committee—the band hasn’t lost its instinct for clever pop: “The Showman (Little More Better),” which features the Edge’s acoustic guitar and a seductive performance by Mr. Mullen, is as catchy as can be.

In his “Songs of Experience,” Blake posits mankind as trapped and forlorn but able to transcend its dire circumstances through love and a refusal to submit to hypocrisy. Bono’s storytelling has long reflected a parallel view. Here, after acknowledging in “The Little Things That Give You Away” that “Sometimes I’m full of anger and grieving / So far away from believing that any sun will reappear,” in “13 (There Is a Light),” he sings, “You start with nothing / You start with a void / Love is all we have left.” The theme of “Love Is Bigger Than Anything in Its Way” is its title.

Bono tackles big issues, including his own mortality. Addressing his recent health problems in “Lights of Home,” he writes, “I shouldn’t be here ’cause I should be dead.” He restates his love for America: “This country is to me a thought that offers grace for every welcome that is sought,” he sings in “American Soul,” while conveying a sense of despair in “The Blackout”: “Democracy is flat on its back, Jack / We had it all and what we had is not coming back.” That Bono can be both a pontificating, steel-willed figure and a musician who opens his heart to admit self-doubt serves well a quartet whose great strength is its mastery of musical melodrama in the rock idiom.

Thus, at its best, “Experience” is in line with “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb” and “No Line on the Horizon,” U2’s finest 21st-century albums. Now in its fifth decade, it remains a great band that works best when it’s self-reliant and rocks with clarity and determination.

Mr. Fusilli is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Email him at jfusilli@wsj.com and follow him on Twitter @wsjrock.

https://www.wsj.com

U2 confronts the dinosaur within on new album 'Songs of Experience'

by Greg Kot


dinosaur wonders why it still walks the earth," U2 sings on “The Blackout.” It’s not the best song on the band’s new album, “Songs of Experience” (Interscope), but it may just be the most revealing.

It’s also an encouraging sign that U2’s latest crisis of faith — and there have been many in the Irish quartet’s storied if fractured career — comes with a dollop of “Jurassic Park” humor, a send-up of its own natural tendency toward bombast and overstatement. U2 lives in constant fear of turning into a classic-rock dinosaur, though it often behaves like one, and it’s refreshing to hear Bono and his bandmates confronting and poking fun at the stodgy old beast that lurks inside the decades-long stadium rockers.

“Songs of Experience” tries to remind listeners that U2 still has a few surprises left to unveil: It’s unusually subtle and low-key at times, it’s frequently self-deprecating, and it has one or two powerful moments that rank with the band’s better music. In sum, it’s kind of a mess, which means it’s a heck of a lot more interesting than its predecessor, the ill-fated 2014 album, “Songs of Innocence,” now best known as the dud that invaded iTunes user’s libraries in a poorly conceived marketing stunt cooked up by the band and Apple.

Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen Jr. have made some of their finest music when they act like they have nothing to lose. That was particularly true during the ’90s, which produced a mix of noisy, jumbled, occasionally confusing and confused albums that veered between accidental masterpieces such as “Achtung Baby!” and half-finished tangents such as “Pop” and the “Passengers” side project. It was a great time to be a U2 fan, with music that was both raw and ridiculous, with bursts of unexpected poignancy, humor and why-the-hell-not? experimentation.

The ’90s, and “Achtung Baby!” in particular, also marked the first of several “comebacks” in U2’s career. It was followed by an era of more conservative albums that recycled the band’s best ’80s moves once the experiments started to lose luster with a fan base yearning for more “Joshua Tree”-style guitar anthems.

“Songs of Experience” tries to make amends for “Songs of Innocence” by easing back slightly on the slick pop production that sucked all the character out of the earlier album’s songs. The new album was initially conceived as the “adult” sequel to the childhood memories of “Innocence,” but that plan ran aground as the album churned through nine producers and several revisions. It was finally revamped for the final time after Bono’s mysterious “brush with mortality,” as described by the Edge in a recent interview with Rolling Stone.

The initial impression left by “Experience” is of a more tempered and low-key U2, with Bono delivering some unusually warm and intimate vocals that suggest a man who has indeed faced some sort of personal reckoning. The singer has suggested that several songs were conceived as letters to his wife and children in the aftermath of his near-death experience, and that reflective tone lends a haunted quality to “Love is All We Have Left” and an aura of stunned gratefulness in “Lights of Home.”

In “You’re the Best Thing About Me,” ostensibly one of several love songs on the album that Bono addresses to his wife, the band wrestles with self-doubt over Adam Clayton’s foundation-crashing bass line. Clayton’s bass, long the band’s secret weapon, was largely muted on “Songs of Innocence,” but it resumes its Godzilla-like presence on several “Experience” songs. “I have everything, but I feel like nothing at all,” Bono sings, and later wonders, “Why am I walking away.” Is he talking about his wife? His family? The band itself?

Yet the best that can be said about lesser tracks such as “Get Out of Your Own Way” and especially “American Soul” is that Kendrick Lamar’s bleakly humorous reinterpretation of the biblical beatitudes walks away with both of them. “American Soul” wants desperately to shift the perspective to world events and the refugee crisis, but it’s a heavy-handed stomp that provides a forum for some of Bono’s most face-palm-worthy lyrics: “For refugees like you and me/A country to receive us/Will you be our sanctuary/Refu-Jesus."

Yet two subsequent tracks addressing the same issue leave a far more favorable impression. There’s the nuance of “Summer of Love,” a sparse tribute to the Syrian citizen who continued to nurture his garden amid the carnage of Aleppo. And there’s the fierce conviction and melodic propulsion of “Red Flag Day,” anchored by another shattering Clayton bass line.

The album toggles between extremes, sandwiching strong songs amid ponderous throwaways. As it winds down, the missteps pile up: a lesser husband-wife love song (“Landlady”), a bloated would-be anthem (“Love is Bigger Than Anything in its Way”), and, in “13 (There is a Light),” a rewrite of “Song for Someone” from “Songs of Innocence,” apparently appended to the album to create a false sense of symmetry with its predecessor.

And yet there are also two brash tunes that sound like U2 talking to itself, and by extension its fans, about what it means to be a rock band in 2017. In the shaggy, loose-limbed “The Showman (Little More Better),” Bono suggests that all those we pay for entertainment — including, presumably, the singer in the biggest Irish rock band of all time — shouldn’t be trusted for anything. “I lie for a living, I love to let on,” Bono sings. “But you make it true when you sing along.”

Similarly, “The Blackout,” parodies arena rock with its groaning guitars and, yes, another city-stomping contribution from the irreplaceable Clayton. All doubts are extinguished “when the lights go out” and the music takes over. The takeaway: Dinosaurs really aren’t extinct. They’re alive and well and living inside Adam Clayton’s bass.

Greg Kot is a Tribune critic.

greg@gregkot.com

Twitter @gregkot

“Songs of Experience”

U2

Two and a half stars (out of 4)

http://www.chicagotribune.com

U2 - Songs of Experience

By Alan Corr

The band who tried to make the devil’s music find religion face up to mortality and wrestle with geopolitics on their new album - so business as usual for U2 but there are fresh signs of vitality

U2, that most thoroughly un-rock `n’ roll of rock `n’ roll bands, are not so much shaking all over as aching all over on their 14th album. Songs of Experience is no longer a "companion" piece to 2014’s windy Songs of Innocence but a collection of thirteen new tablets of stone from the Dublin veterans, all carved with lyrics about mortality, love, and even the actual act of performance itself. 

This wouldn’t be a U2 album if front man Bono wasn’t back trying to throw his arms around the world in an over-earnest manner that threatens to smother the good work of his fellow band mates. The ongoing refugee crisis is mentioned, America’s slide into cartoon autocracy is touched upon, and matters familial take up a lot of space here. 

Bono is also facing up to mortality after a nasty bicycling accident in New York in late 2014 and, more seriously, what he calls a "recent brush with death", which he refers to on several songs here. So far, so U2 but there are also signs of life amid the naff lyrics ("For refugees like you and me/A country to receive us/Will you be our sanctuary/Refu-Jesus") and over-reaching musical bombast - the band actually sound more vital and than they have since their self-decreed comeback, 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind.


The much delayed and much tinkered with SOE was produced by Jacknife Lee and Ryan Tedder with Steve Lillywhite, Andy Barlow (of unsung electronic music duo Lamb), and Jolyon Thomas, and the songs shimmy between traditional U2 bombast and something far deeper and self-analytical. There are cranked-up rockers like the War era Red Flag Day but there are also moments of reflection and humour like The Showman.

However, too many of these songs sound like Bono is being immolated by his self-obsession again and the listener’s interest in the singer’s private life will dictate how much room in their hearts they have for another paean from a very famous bloke to his wife and kids. The Landlady, with its pitter patter drums and clipped guitars, is a cute but slightly meandering love letter to his wife Ali and elsewhere he wonders how his children will fare as they enter into adulthood. Listening to all this is just a tad like having to view your mate’s Instagram posts of his summer backpacking in Goa. 


When poet Brendan Kenneally advised Bono to "write like you’re dead" he probably didn’t have such lines as "You are rock and roll/You and I are rock and roll/You are rock and roll" in mind. There are many other moments of facepalm naffness on SOE. You may even utter "Refu-Jesus!" several times but the alchemy of the band make up for the more mawkish moments.

The Edge has magicked up some of his more inventive and engaging riffs in years (Hendrix here, Harrison there) and the engine room of Adam and Larry stomp all over the place, reasserting themselves amid the sci-fi gospel tunes and ambient longueurs. Adam Clayton’s bass in particular prowls the precincts like a very cool cat and the nuts and bolts mechanics of Larry Mullen’s drumming often hold the over-reaching arrangements together with ballast and sheer muscle power.


That impressive gallery of top notch producers behind the desk and in the studio means that there is much sonic messing about. Some of it is thrilling; Love Is All We Have Left is a spectral prayer in which Bono tries vocoder for the first time, and the scrappy Sweet Jane styled The Showman is among the best songs here, with its self-reproofing lyric and a surprising appearance of a brass section.


Bono’s chronicle of a death foretold, Lights Of Home, also has a strong melody with yearning guitars gnawing away at the edges and mucho tub thumping from Larry before it takes off into a heart-bursting anthem. But that talent for the lumbering and the inconsequential is also present. You're The Best Thing About Me is U2 by numbers, complete with distorted bass, exotic strings, a cathartic guitar solo, and some pretty ill-judged chord changes. It is only slightly less irksome than City of Shining Lights.

Get out of Your Own Way is another one of those dispiriting U2 moments when U2 sound like The Killers trying to do a U2 song only with possibly less clichés and tuneless choruses while Kendrick Lemar’s satirical Old Testament fire and brimstone preaching is the best thing about the dumb stomp of American Soul.

There are many references to the past. The Little Things That Give You Away may touch on the small hours menace of Achtung Baby but it’s just another plodding verse/chorus workout that collapses after a breakneck dash to an anti-climax. The Blackout, however, bounds along with all the distortion of Zoo TV era on a bassline that would support a suspension bridge.

There are also plenty of well-meaning but top heavy clunkers like Love Is Bigger Than Anything In Its Way (flatulent heroism on a grand scale) and 13 (There Is A Light), a somewhat superfluous slight return to SOI’s windswept Song for Someone.

As is often the case with U2, they are at their very best when they are vulnerable. Questioning his very motivation after a recent volley of fresh attacks, Bono even sounds almost thunderstruck by a new sense of self-awareness on at least one song here. But even after this return to form, the band will remain as polarising as the polarised world they’re singing about.

Despite it all, U2’s staying power, self-belief and hope remains admirable after all these years. Rarely have four men with so much experience sounded so very innocent.

Alan Corr @corralan

https://www.rte.ie

Ways to handle stardom: U2

What would Bono do? Lessons in leadership and activism from the world's most successful band.
By Michael J. Fanuele

U2 wraps up each show of its current world tour with stunning portraits of the most consequential women in history, or as Bono defiantly says, “herstory.” Flashing in 7.6k resolution on the largest high-def screen the world has ever seen are the faces of Sojourner Truth, Rosa Parks and Hillary Clinton. These are some of the nearly hundred women to whom Bono pays tribute, calling them “women who stood up or sat down for their rights, who insisted and persisted, who light the way.”

This is classic fare for U2, a band that has always brought some church revival to its rock ’n’ roll, preaching while playing. AIDS, poverty, political violence — these are the scourges against which U2 rallies its fans. And if you’ve been to this service, you know how rousing it can be.

When I first saw U2 perform a decade ago, Bono asked us each to work for justice from the “bridges of Selma to the peaks of Kilimanjaro” as every African nation’s flag unfurled in the arena and The Edge plucked the first bars of the band’s next anthem. At that moment, I enlisted — though I had no idea what I would actually do. I could write a check to Amnesty International. I could embrace the nearest stranger. I felt compelled to do something, anything. I was moved. At that moment, with those people, I believed we could make the world a better place.

U2 isn’t only a circus of soft feelings, however. Its members have actually accomplished a great deal of good, raising awareness and money (by some estimates half a billion dollars) for myriad charitable organizations. They’ve used their celebrity to lobby governments, to direct the world’s attention to Africa, ravaged by disease, war and poverty. Bono is the only rock star ever nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, a nomination he received three times. Even President George W. Bush couldn’t resist Bono’s entreaties. The two worked together to bring record levels of foreign aid to Africa. “Bono floored me,” Bush said, “with his knowledge, his energy and his faith.” That’s Bono: flooring world leaders and mobilizing their people.

So how does Bono do it? What is the magic of this supernatural shaman? What spirit does he wield that possesses populations and politicians, not only helping hearts blossom, but changing the very behavior of communities and governments?

Well, it’s inspiration — and no band does it better than U2. In fact, U2 provides lessons in inspiration for all who aspire to move a crowd, from political leaders and corporate executives to teachers and coaches and parents. How do they do it? How does U2 move masses? In addition to the raw power of some irresistible tunes, U2 employs three “notes of inspiration” that sway audiences:

• First, U2 sets grand ambitions. Its members didn’t want to be a rock band. They wanted to be the greatest rock band in the world, and when they achieved that status, they wanted to be something even bigger: to be an instrument for social justice. They want to end the transmission of HIV from mothers to babies. They want to eliminate malaria. They want to eradicate racism and stamp out gender inequality. These are not modest goals; in fact, they’re slightly preposterous. But perhaps it’s the very audacity of these ambitions that inspires conviction. It’s hard to generate an emotional response when talking to the sensible parts of a person. Al Gore had a plan to reduce carbon emissions. He lost. Barack Obama promised to lower the very tides of the oceans. He won. People are moved to do big things, and so as leaders, don’t fear the grand and the audacious and the slightly ridiculous. These are the goals that stretch our imaginations.

• Next, U2 is obsessed with action. Pray. Dance. Sing. Donate. Buy. Write. Protest. U2 is a band of verbs. Like Nike, its first priority is what it wants people to do, not what it wants people to believe. It’s a lesson behavioral psychologists have been practicing for decades: change behavior and beliefs follow; the reverse is too difficult. Religions have known this even longer, encouraging fasting and tithing and missionary work. As Bono himself said, “God doesn’t want prayers; he wants alms.” Leaders should learn from this: Don’t waste your time trying to get your team to buy into your agenda or understand your vision; instead, be dead-clear about what you want them to do. According to Daniel McGinn in his book “Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed,” this “direction giving” language is every bit as motivating as the grander, gauzier stuff.

• Finally, U2 inspires because it is authentic. A leader can’t hope to move an audience if that audience sniffs a phony. As a band that grew up through the Troubles, hearing bombs explode on Dublin streets and losing friends to sectarian violence, U2 has the moral permission to preach, as it did in Paris as the first performers after the terrorist attack at the Bataclan. “We’re a life cult,” Bono said that week, making it clear the band was coming back to the city as the anti-ISIS. It was coming to do the hard work of healing a community, turning fear and hate into courage and love.

Bono is a creation, of course, a rock ’n’ roll avatar constructed by a teenage Paul Hewson. And yet, “he” is so comfortable in his Bono skin, self-possessed and certain, sunglasses always on. Leaders can learn from that confident expression of character. Know yourself, for sure, but express yourself as a one-of-a-kind entity, a character with passions and quirks all your own. In that display of particular personality comes the authenticity necessary for inspiration.

Ambition. Action. Authenticity. These are the critical elements of inspiration that U2 manifests so powerfully. They’re on glorious display when Bono enters an arena, but they can be displayed by each of us, every day, in the conference rooms and classrooms where the hard work of building a better world gets done. As Bono remarked, “You put on the leather pants and the pants start telling you what to do.”

Michael J. Fanuele is a marketing consultant who most recently served as chief creative officer at General Mills. He’s writing a book about inspiration.

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Trip Through Your Words

Trip Through Your Words: Bono and the books that became the seeds for The Joshua Tree

Having once memorably sung “Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief”, BONO has never been shy when it comes to acknowledging his artistic influences. Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor, Sam Shepard and Raymond Carver were amongst his literary reference points when it came to penning the lyrics for The Joshua Tree. By OLAF TYARANSEN

In 2014, twenty-seven years after its seismic release, U2’s fifth studio album The Joshua Tree was deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the US Library of Congress. The Dublin band’s bestselling, game-changing, (maybe) magnum opus was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry. A fitting home for a work of musical art that was described by Bono at the timeas “our most literate record so far”.

The singer was talking about the music as much as the lyrics, but both the melodies and the words were very much inspired by all things American. Following on from the sophisticated, stylistic European atmospherics of 1984’s The Unforgettable Fire, U2 had gotten all down and dirty, donning cowboy hats and deeply immersing themselves in American roots music, folk, gospel and blues.

Looking for insights into the vast country that had already somewhat embraced them (and was set to seriously make them ‘Rock’s Hottest Ticket’, as their debut Time cover story put it), and with the conscious ambition of creating the aural equivalent of the Great American Novel, Bono had gone west in his reading: later name-checking the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Sam Shepard, Raymond Carver, Saul Bellow and Norman Mailer in interviews.

“We had all fallen under the spell of America, not the TV reality but the dream, the version of America that Martin Luther King spoke about,” Edge explained in the band’s autobiography, U2 by U2. “Bono had been reading Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote. The language of the American writers particularly struck him, the kind of imagery and cinematic quality of the American landscape became a stepping-off point.”

In the same book, Bono wrote, “I started to see two Americas. The mythic America and the real America. It was an age of greed, Wall Street, button down, win, win, win, no time for losers. New York was bankrupt. There was a harsh reality to America as well as the dream. So I started working on something which in my own mind was going to be called The Two Americas.”

Apparently it was Bruce Springsteen who personally recommended the work of southern author Flannery O’Connor to his fellow rock star. Like the Dublin singer, O’Connor was deeply religious, although her own brand of faith eschewed that of fundamentalism and fanaticism. Bono has cited her 1952 debut novel, Wise Blood – described by its publishers on its original cover as ‘A Searching Novel of Sin and Redemption’ – as a serious influence on The Joshua Tree.

In her introduction to the tenth anniversary edition of Wise Blood, O’Connor herself stated that the book is about “freedom, free will, life and death, and the inevitability of belief.” Themes of redemption, racism, sexism and isolation also run through the novel. As they did throughout the album.O’Connor’s delight in aphorisms would also undoubtedly have appealed to Bono. Indeed, some of her sayings sound uncannily like quotes from his own mouth: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” She also wrote: “Where there is no belief in the soul there is very little drama. Either one is serious about salvation or one is not. And it is well to realize the maximum amount of seriousness admits the maximum amount of comedy. Only if we are secure in our beliefs can we see the comical side of the universe.”

Bono later told U2 fan magazine Propaganda, “I’ve never felt such sympathy with a writer in America before.”

O’Connor’s work, along with the short stories of Sam Shepard and Raymond Carver, helped the songwriter in his quest to understand “the ordinary stock first, and then the outsiders, the driftwood – those on the fringes of the promised land, cut off from the American dream.”

U2's 'Pop': A Reimagining of the Album 20 Years Later

U2 are going all out to celebrate the 30th anniversary of The Joshua Tree this year, complete with a new super-deluxe box set and a stadium tour where they'll play the 1987 LP straight through. Lost in all the hubbub is another major U2 milestone. The 20th anniversary of 1997's Pop came and went this month without a peep from the U2 camp, but that's not really surprising. The electronica-influenced disc polarized fans and critics when it came out. With the exception of the soundtrack to their 1988 film Rattle and Hum, it was their first album that was seen as a disappointment, and it forced them to retreat back to a more traditional U2 sound for 2000's All That You Can't Leave Behind.

Looking back years later, U2 said the album was marred by their foolish decision to book a stadium tour long before it was ready. "Deadlines were looming ominously," Bono said. "Pop never had the chance to be properly finished. It is really the most expensive demo session in the history of music." But during the course of the PopMart Tour they made heroic efforts to fix the thing, releasing new mixes of the songs as singles and fiddling with the live arrangements as the tour progressed. The work continued in 2002 when they released The Best of 1990–2000, which featured new mixes of some Pop songs. If you piece it all together, they practically made an entirely new version of the album. The band never did piece it all together, though, so – as promised on a recent Rolling Stone Music Now podcast – we did it for them. Here's a new version of Pop in the original sequence. It's not better – it's just different.

To be clear, we're not saying here that Pop is a bad album. We love it. (The poster has proudly hung in this writer's childhood bedroom for the past 20 years.) This is just a way to hear what it may have sounded like had U2 had a little more time to work on it.

U2 Returns to Paris for Concert Called Off After Terrorist Attacks

U2 performed at the AccorHotels Arena on Sunday in Paris, invoking the memories of victims around the world.CreditThomas Samson/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — The Irish band U2 returned to Paris on Sunday night to play the first of two shows that had been postponed in the wake of the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks that left 130 people dead, including 89 at the Bataclan, a music hall where the American band Eagles of Death Metal were playing when it was stormed by gunmen.

It was the first large-scale cultural event in the city since the attacks, and security at the AccorHotels Arena, just a few miles from the Bataclan, was tight, with concertgoers undergoing full body searches as they entered and a heavy police presence outside.

“Tonight we are all Parisian,” Bono, the band’s frontman, said in French to the sold-out crowd of 17,000, adding in English, “If you love liberty, then Paris is your hometown.” Near the end of the set, he retrieved a French flag from the crowd, draping it over his shoulder and later placing it in front of the band’s drums.

U2 had been set to play at the arena on Nov. 14 and 15 on its “Innocence and Experience” tour, but called off the shows, citing the state of emergency that had been put in place across France. The tour will end Monday night in Paris, with a show scheduled to be broadcast by HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern.

There had been reports that U2 would be joined onstage in Paris by Eagles of Death Metal, but earlier on Sunday U2 posted on its website: “This is not the case. We have another surprise guest planned for tonight’s show.”

That guest turned out to be Patti Smith, who closed out the 27-song concert with her 1988 song “People Have the Power,” with its refrain “The power to dream, to rule/To wrestle the world from fools.”

In an interview ahead of the concerts, Bono said it was important for the band to return to the stage as soon as possible. “Terrorism relies on people being terrorized, and we were not going to be,” he said. “We felt the biggest and the only real contribution we can make at moment like that is to honor the people of Paris, who brought us the concept of liberté, égalité, fraternité.”

Nonetheless, the show included an acknowledgment that Paris still remained on edge less than a month after the attacks. The simulated bomb meant to mark the band’s transition from innocence to experience (the album pegged to the tour is “Songs of Innocence”) in recent concerts remained part of the show, albeit with a warning: Before the band took the stage a voice over a loudspeaker announced that the explosions “are part of the show, are safe and are nothing to be concerned about.”

Bono made repeated references to Paris throughout the show, and the five-song encore opened with “City of Blinding Lights” as huge screens in the background showed images of the capital by night followed by the names of the Nov. 13 victims. The song ended with Bono singing lyrics from the Jacque Brel song “Ne Me Quitte Pas” (“Don’t Leave Me”).

The rest of the encore included the band’s early anthems “Beautiful Day,” “Bad,” and “One,” which was modified to include the chorus from another U2 song “Invisible”: “There is no them. There’s only us.”

This is not the first time that U2 has paid tribute to the victims of terror. When the band played Madison Square Garden a few weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, it honored emergency services workers onstage and also projected the names of those killed.

The band touched on other highly charged topics in Sunday’s show, with references to H.I.V., the war in Syria and the European migrant crisis, displaying the hashtag #refugeeswelcome on large screens at one point.

Few fans apparently were deterred from attending the rescheduled shows. Of the 34,000 tickets sold for the November concerts, just 2,000 were refunded and resold, according to the band.

Stephane Le Bozec, 47, who drove more than five hours from the Brittany region to be in Paris for the concert, said that the idea of not attending never crossed his mind, “not for a second.” He added: “We’re not afraid. Music is my passion and the attacks make it even important to be here, to share our passion for music and for U2.”

Léa Vlaeminck, 19, a student from New Caledonia who was at the concert with her boyfriend, said she was proud to attend. “It’s how we can fight terrorism, by continuing to go to concerts,” she said. “I feel it’s our duty to be here.”